Posts tagged with Smartphone

We’ve all been there. It’s the day of travel and you’re scrambling to get to the airport. Tempers are high, boarding passes are scattered, your arms are already sore from lugging that heavy suitcase down the stairs.

But traveler anxiety starts well before the big day, stretching back to the initial stages of the planning process.

During each unique stage of the mobile journey, travelers experience changes in their mindset and behaviors, requiring brands to take a closer look at how to close the gap between what users want and what they are offering on mobile.

This comes from a new multi-device study, conducted by Facebook in collaboration with GfK, revealing people’s behaviour when it comes to moving across devices (smartphone, tablet and desktop) on a day-to-day basis.

It’s becoming increasingly common practice to switch to a different device, even though we may have started a task on a different one all together.

While sat at home, it’s far easier to research a product we’ve seen on television via the smartphone that’s sat within arm’s reach, than it is to walk ALL the way to another room to fire up a desktop computer and wait minutes for it to boot up. It’s a wonder we ever bought anything online before the advent of smartphones.

However for the actual purchase or completion of more seemingly complicated task, we prefer a larger screen and therefore we’re more likely to finish the task on a tablet, laptop or desktop computer.

Here are some more stats from the study, plus bonus 'real-life' photographic examples of multi-device use.

If you weren’t aware, Google does indoor maps. If you were aware, you may not have known of the extent of the buildings that have been mapped already. You can view a list of over 10,000 buildings that have been mapped, here.

Users can upload their own building plans, as long as the building in question is public and there’s no problem with copyright or secrecy.

Uploading a building map of your stores, much like John Lewis and House of Fraser in the UK and Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s in the US, is probably a great idea. I’ve previously discussed the smartphone user journey, and indoor maps can slot right in to Google’s domination of that journey.

Even those who aren’t looking for anything specific on their phone, i.e. passing trade, might be tempted by maps. Certainly, if there is any pedestrian traffic outside of your stores, the extra detail may persuade potential customers to step inside, especially if there’s a marker on café, toilets, sportswear, perfume etc. (although the user has to be fully zoomed in to see the indoor map).

The initial benefit, of course, is that lost and tech-savvy customers (teens is likely to be a big demographic) can find their way to whichever desk or concession they need, once inside.

To some shoppers, the idea of needing a Google Map to find the toilets in a supermarket is a bit demoralising – surely we don’t need tech so far engrained in our lives? But, with malls, out of town shopping centres and bigger retail stores a trend that hasn’t abated, I think in retail there’s a good case for indoor maps.

And there are lots of good uses outside of retail, too. Let’s take a look at some of the best uses of indoor maps, taken from Google’s case studies.

Google recently launched its new mobile playbook, replacing last year’s edition, in which it gives details on how marketers can improve their mobile strategy.

Here we’ll take at a look at the key points that Google raises, mainly the five questions which it believes businesses need to ask themselves in relation to mobile marketing, and provide you with Econsultancy’s own research and understanding within each area.

After looking at the pros and cons of NFC (near field communication), it’s clear there’s a place for tapping to enjoy content as well as to pay for products.

However, the customer’s willingness to tap a poster with their phone is dependent on how well many initial NFC campaigns are carried out. Some clunky efforts, with terrible landing pages and insufficient incentives have risked putting users off for good.

This is changing as brands start to use the technology in better surroundings and to better purpose. A mall is the perfect environment to encourage users to tap with their friends.

To that end, from this week, shoppers can “turn on, tap and enjoy” content and competitions at Westfield shopping centres in London through CBS Outdoor digital pods, which use Proxama’s TapPoint NFC platform.

Mobile commerce sales have doubled in the space of a year and now account for almost a quarter of total online sales, according to a new report.

It again highlights the growing importance of m-commerce at a time when many retailers are still struggling to develop effective, user-friendly mobile sites and apps.

The new data from IMRG and Capgemini shows that sales completed through mobile devices accounted for 23.2% of total ecommerce sales in Q2 2013, up from 11.6% in the same period last year.

A separate survey included in the Econsultancy Mobile Commerce Compendium found that half of smartphone owners (51%) hadn’t made a purchase using their smartphone in the previous six months, which shows that there is still huge potential for m-commerce sales to continue rising as a proportion of total online sales.

One of the voices was Proxama’s. It runs TapPoint, which is a cloud-based SAAS. I spoke to the MD, Miles Quitmann, and he was refreshingly honest enough to turn my oil tanker of beef around and leave me excited about the possibilities of loyalty ‘on tap’.

So here’s a summary of emerging possibilities for marketers, using the growing number of NFC enabled smartphones in the market.

With the explosion of mobile devices in recent years, your email campaign could be opened at any time and in a much wider variety of locations and situations than a few years ago, when practically all emails were checked on a desktop computer.

So what are some of the most popular locations that your emails could be opened? And are your subscribers likely to convert from your email when they are in that location?

Alternative payment methods are pretty much the hottest topic around, and last week EE previewed its new NFC smartphone wallet. Retailers, however, are pretty adamant NFC wallets are not worth their time.

At the same time, marketers are still plugging away with new advertising campaigns using NFC technology to deliver content. Is this anything other than a fad?

In this post I look at the uses of NFC, assess some recent campaigns, and ponder what the future holds. (Major hat tip to NFC World, where I found a bunch of the campaign info).